Hart Casts More Pearls Before Swine

David Bentley Hart has a new article out in the January edition of First Things, so naturally my heart is all a-flutter. My first impulse is obviously to take this brief thousand-or-so word article and compose a voluminous, multi-part series on its many strengths and weaknesses. Since, however, I only just completed one such exercise in shameless intellectual fawning, I will try to condense my reflections on "The Precious Steven Pinker" to a single entry.

As the title suggests, Hart's article is responding to Steven Pinker's latest effort, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. At its core, this work is essentially the antithesis of Hart's earlier Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Pinker's aim is to demonstrate how, contrary to popular perception (and Hart's academic conclusion), the world is actually a safer, less violent place than in dark times past. Further, Pinker wants his readers to believe that the cause of this improvement has been the rise of "reason" and the abatement of religion. Hart deftly identifies three core problems with this assessment.

1) The Myth of the "Dark Ages"

Pinker, being himself a psychologist and not a historian, falls all to easily into the common fable in the popular canon of historical myth that there was such a time as the "Dark Ages" when everything was horrible, all the advances of classical civilization were lost, and blind, corrosive faith reigned supreme. In Hart's own words, Pinker's "almost cartoonish" treatment of the Middle Ages consists in him presenting them "as a single historical, geographical, and cultural moment" easily encapsulated in the caricature which dominates vulgar discourse. In truth, the Middle Ages (inappropriately so-called) were a diverse time both of great progress (whatever that may mean) and great tragedy, depending on when, where, and of whom we are speaking.

[Pinker] says nothing of almshouses, free hospitals, municipal physicians, hospices, the decline of chattel slavery, the Pax Dei and Treuga Dei, and so on. Of the more admirable cultural, intellectual, legal, spiritual, scientific, and social movements of the High Middle Ages, he appears to know nothing. And his understanding of early modernity is little better. His vague remarks on the long-misnamed “Wars of Religion” are tantalizing intimations of a fairly large ignorance.

It is difficult to write a history of violence without at least some firm grasp of history.

2) The Myth of the secular "Enlightenment"

Pinker will make the same error of two dimensional thinking with his reconstruction of the Enlightenment. He sees "not the dark side of the “Enlightenment” and the printing press—“scientific racism,” state absolutism, Jacobinism, the rise of murderous ideologies, and so on—but the nice Enlightenment of “perpetual peace,” the “rights of man,” and so on." There is a greater error that Hart exposes in Pinker's treatment of the Enlightenment, however, and that is the assumption that its positive advances (and there were many) were somehow purely secular. He ignores that many of the ideas of the Enlightenment had their root directly and relevantly in religious, "unreasonable" concepts which preceded them. Pinker acknowledges know sense of continuity, no genetic association between the thought of the "dark ages" and that of the Enlightenment.

Pinker’s is a story not of continuous moral evolution, but of an irruptive redemptive event. It would not serve his purpose to admit that, in addition to the gradual development of the material conditions that led to modernity, there might also have been the persistent pressure of moral ideas and values that reached back to antique or medieval sources, or that there might have been occasional institutional adumbrations of modern “progress” in the Middle Ages, albeit in a religious guise.

Polemicists--particularly those who are not historians--make this error in almost every attempt to marshal history to an ideological cause. Consider the ongoing argument in American politics about whether or not the country was founded on Christian ideas. The question should not be--though it too often is--was Benjamin Franklin an agnostic or James Madison a deist? The issue is with the proximate and ultimate cultural sources of ideas such as "perpetual peace" and "the rights of man" which characterize the Enlightenment and encapsulate the core principles of the American experiment.

3) The Flaw in Comparative Statistics

Perhaps the most pernicious of Pinker's errors is not historical but statistical. There is an ongoing debate which centers around whether or not to adjust statistics about violence to account for population figures. Pinker is of the school of thought that violence should be measured statistically as a figure of violent deaths per capita. This certainly has an objective reasonableness to it. After all, it would not due to say that the total combined wealth of the United States in the 1920s was ten billion dollars, that it was one hundred billion dollars in the 2000s, ergo people are ten times wealthier now than they were then. That is, however, precisely the problem. Pinker's argument understands human life in the same way that it does money. In truth, we intuitively realize that a single human life has an absolute value which cannot be comparatively reduced. Pinker's statistics leave no room for this distinction.

But statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens...In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion.

Hart points out other flaws in Pinker's statistical methods as well, including the increased life expectancy and decreased infant mortality, each of which Hart believes skews the numbers in support of Pinker's theory.

The most enjoyable part of Hart's article is certainly his surgical evisceration of Pinker's argument, but Hart concludes on a milder note, praising the stream of Pinker's thought for not succumbing to the crushing weight postmodernism. He waxes poetic, as he so often does, about the beautiful, inviolable faith of those who pretend to be faithless. In truth, the above does not begin to mine the riches which I believe are embedded in all of Hart's prose, but I will leave it to interested parties to read the remainder of the article. It is certainly well worth it.

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 4)

After spending days parsing my thoughts on Jenson, Hart, and Hart on Jenson, all that remains is to share with you the memorable wisdom David Bentley Hart imparted:

Well, theology is a particularly savage business (at least when it is done right), and one that it is never too early to discourage one's children from entering.

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 3)

As is inevitably the case when the conversation turns to classical descriptors for God (e.g. impassible, immutable, eternal), the question of whether or not true faith was corrupted by the evil of Hellenistic philosophy arises. It is a the common calumny of almost every contemporary Protestant theologian that at some point during its development, Christian doctrine sold its soul to "Hellenism." During the course of his discussion of this belief, in which he gladly embraces the early Christian conversation with Platonism as "the special work of the Holy Spirit," Hart uses an illuminating term to characterize this Protestant understanding of God: "Teutonism." There seems to be a common delusion among Protestant scholars--and I encountered this most recently in Paul Hinlicky's Divine Complexity--that if they can only reject the corrupting influences of Hellenism, they will automatically return to an authentic Biblical (sometimes termed "Semetic") worldview. What Hart deftly points out with this term is that this new brand of thinking is not some genuinely detached return to unblemished biblical thought (which incidentally arose in a Hellenistic context); it is deeply dependent on another extrabiblical philosophical paradigm, German Idealism. It was German historical and systematic theologians who reconstructed an early Christian narrative in which a simple faith gradually gave way to a philosophical one, who declared that this acquiescence was fundamentally unsound, and who devised a philosophically "independent" theology of God in response. (It is strange that this had never occurred to me before, especially given how much time I spend thinking about the Restorationist delusion that they were reconstruction authentic biblical Christianity rather than formulating a new Baconian Christianity.)

Without declaring either "Hellenism" or "Teutonism" superior (though it ought to be obvious from my previous posts where I fall), it seems that Hart's disposition toward philosophical "intrusion" into one's worldview is the only honest one. We must be aware of, admit, and embrace our philosophical heritage rather than laboring under the pretense that we attempt theology in a void.

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 2)

It is so rare that I disagree with David Bentley Hart, and when I feel compelled to do so it is always with the utmost trepidation. Nevertheless--in spite of the fact that, as Stanley Hauerwas put it, "The sheer delight that David Bentley's turns of phrase invite tempts me to agree with anything he writes--almost"--in reading his endorsement of Robert Jenson's Christology, which stresses the inseparability of the Son and Jesus, I wonder if Hart does not go too far.

Jesus is not an avatar of the Logos, a mask the Son assumes in a transient or extrinsic fashion, or a part he plays in some grand cosmic charade. When God becomes man, this is the man he becomes--and there can be no other. That is why it is silly to ask the questions that bad theologians, or casual catechists, or well-meaning Sunday School teachers have sometimes felt moved to ask: whether the Son might have been incarnate as someone else-as a Viking, or a Nigerian, or a woman, or simply another first-century Jew. The Logos, when he divests himself of his divine glory, is this man: between this finite historical individual and the eternal and infinite Son of God, there is no caesura. Jesus is not a manifestation of the Son, but the Son in his only true human form.

I certainly sympathize with Hart's general point, that the person of Jesus was not a triviality in the divine plan. There is no person of Jesus apart from the Incarnate Word (and, as far as both Jenson and Hart are concerned, no Word apart from its incarnation in Jesus). I even agree with the rejection of trivial musings like "could Jesus have been a Viking" or the more common "could he have been a she"--though this is more because I think they are unproductive than fundamentally unsound.

Where I find myself forced to dissent, however, is in tying every particular of Jesus to the eternal Son. Hart seems to insist that the Son could not have come as a different ethnicity or a different gender not for pragmatic reasons but for essential ones. This leads to other trivial (but I imagine damning) questions, like "if Jesus were an inch taller, would he cease to be divine" or "if he were balding" (instead of having a full head of flowing chestnut hair, as we all know he had) "would he no longer be the Son?" There is of course a sense in which it is true that the Son became incarnate as he did, the way he did, because that was the perfect time and the perfect manifestation for the perfect purpose of God. At the same time, to tie those contingent realities to the eternality of the Son seems to contradict Hart's normally strong rejection of any limitation or finitude in God.

Perhaps he wouldn't disagree with this (though there is nothing in the above quote to make me think he wouldn't), but I would think it safer to say that the Son could have come in any way he chose but, being perfectly obedient to the will of the Father, chose freely to come as he did, when he did, for the purpose he did. That does not, I think, mean that I believe Jesus was merely an "avatar of the Logos."

The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok (Pt. 1)

Perhaps my favorite thing about David Bentley Hart is that it hardly matters about what he is writing. If he puts ink on paper it is more or less certain to be witty, engaging, and intellectually provocative. I was reminded of this recently when I realized that it had been months since I dusted off the large section of my bookshelf dedicated to Hart and allowed myself to be immersed in his prose. To correct this, I picked an article at random to read: "The Angel at the Ford of Jabbok: On the Theology of Robert Jenson." The essay took the form of a response to criticisms--which Hart considered legitimate--about his hasty treatment of Jenson's work in a recent publication. In response, he made an effort to summarise, praise, and disagree with Jenson in the matter of a few short pages.

Most of Hart's disagreements with Jenson are philosophical and theological in nature, and they are criticisms I certainly found compelling. There was one area in which, in my estimation, Jenson's theology went uncritiqued, perhaps because Hart lacked space or perhaps because he doesn't give the line of argument much currency. There is, however, a degree to which Jenson's anthropology is unconvincing because it is emotionally unsatisfying. This does not, of course, preclude the logical possibility that Jenson is correct, but inasmuch as theology is an encounter with the divine and, in the words of Vladimir Lossky, it is impossible to totally separate "personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church" it is impossible to affirm teachings which are so existentially destructive as to nullify any positive experience of God.

Hart himself recongizes that "summary is usually invidious," and I admit that to make a critique based solely on someone else's summary is even more odious. With that said, however, here is what Hart has to say about Jenson which has so disturbed me:

Who God is, therefore, subsists in the Father's loving concern for the Son and the Son's loving obedience to the Father, and in the freedom of the Spirit who--as unending divine futurity--makes this relation eternal. In Jenson's rather daring formulation, the Spirit "frees" the Father and the Son for the adventure of this love, and for the infinite possibility that is this love's perfection. As for us, our place in this drama is that of the compaions of the Son: we are included in the story of God's freedom because Christ is the man who is for all men, and so for the Father to have Christ as his Son he must ahve us as well; for there is no Son apart from him who said "Father, forgive them."

Hart will object that Jenson's construction removes any Logos asarkos (a Word apart from the incarnation in Jesus) and that Jenson's admirable focus on Christ's uniqueness is meaningless without a classical understanding of transcendence which Jenson rejects. For my part, what struck me is just how trivial I become in this narrative and not just me but you too. All of humanity becomes incidental, the happenstance of this eternal love and becoming. That the Son happened to be man for all men, that he should happen to need or desire or will companions, that he would be predestined to say "Father, forgive them" means that there must be an object for that being, that desire, that phrase. God does not create us out of love or out of an ontological impulse to create or out of a desire to share the beauty of otherness (which, as best I recall, approaches ideas expressed by Hart himself), but merely so that the Son who was always determined to the Son incarnate needed a place and a body and a community into which to incarnate. We are all no more than the industrial by-product of God's mechanism of becoming, and I for one find that thought deeply disatisfying. Perhaps it is theologically naive of me, but I have always been inclined to believe that the Incarnation was for the sake of creation and not creation for the sake of the Incarnation (which Jenson's systems seems to suggest).

In the course of a few short pages, Hart gave me innumerable quotes worth sharing and provoked a wealth of theological thought, but in the interest of not being any more longwinded than I already have, I will save those thoughts for another entry.

#100

In honor of this, my one hundreth entry, I present the top ten quotes of the previous ninety-nine entries:

10) David Lipscomb from The Wisdom of David Lipscomb. As tempting as it was to quote Lipscomb on the question of civil government or pacifism (issues about which I feel strongly), this quote is infintely more compelling to me.

And it may be set down as a truth that all reformations that propose to stop short of a full surrender of the soul, mind, and body up to God, are of the devil.

9) Bill Burton from Muslims: Do They EVER Pray?. I have comment on a number of obscenely stupid news articles, and this quote typifies them all.

The president is obviously a Christian. He prays every day.

8) Symeon the New Theologian from An Earnest Prayer For Taking the Eucharist. It is hard for me to read this and not think that I am missing something every Sunday morning when I pass the Lord's Supper down the aisle.

You have vouchsafed me, O Lord, that this corruptible temple, my human flesh, should be united to your holy flesh, that my blood should be mingled with yours, and henceforth I am your transparent and translucent member. I am transported out of myself. I see myself such as I am to become. Fearful and at the same time ashamed of myself I venerate you and tremble before you.

7) G. K. Chesterton from The Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton (Excursus 1). Chesterton, among other things, revolutionized the way I thought about love. His was by no means the only voice as I began to reconsider how I understood the affirmation that God is love, but his was very likely the initial voice. These are a pair of related quotes to illustrate his points.

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else.

6) David Bentley Hart from Recommendation: Atheist Delusions. The full quote--and for that matter, the entire book--is very enlightening, but in the interest of brevity, I will include only the introduction.

There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.

5) Georges Florovsky from The Wisdom of Georges Florovsky. This opinion of the role of history in theology (particularly in churhces like the Orthodox Church) stands in stark and refreshing contrast with the lifeless formalism and repitition which is at least the stereotype of so many tradition oriented churches.

This call to 'go back' to the Fathers can be easily misunderstood. It does not mean a return to the letter of patristic documents...What is really meant and required is not a blind or servile imitation and repetition but rather a further development of this patristic teaching, both homogeneous and congenial. We have to kindle again the creative fire of the Fathers, to restore in ourselves the patristic spirit.

4) Rene Descartes from Descartes, Unexpected. It was hard to choose a single quote about the foolishness of using logic to limit God, but Descartes stands out as something of a surprising (at least to me) spokesman for the "irrational" position.

The mathematical truths which you call eternal have been laid down by God and depend on him entirely no less than the rest of his creatures...In general we can assert that God can do everything that is beyond our grasp but not that he cannot do what is beyond our grasp. It would be rash to think that our imagination reaches as far as his power.

3) Vladimir Lossky from The God of the Square-Circle. No less than the inability of logic to limit God, the limits which reason imposes on human knowledge have enticed me. It would be easier, and perhaps more appropriate, to cite a fourteenth century hesychast on this point, but Lossky sums it up nicely nevertheless.

The only rational notion which we can have of God will still be that of His incomprehensibility. Consequently, theology must be not so much a quest of positive notions about the divine being as an experience which surpasses all understanding.

2) James A. Garfield from A Sentiment Plagarized from James A. Garfield's Journal, June 14, 1853. This quote, while seemingly devoid of content, expresses shockingly well my attitude about the way I have spent the better part of the last two years.

I sit down to insult my journal by making a few senseless marks upon its page – merely stating that this day shared the fate of its predecessors, and perhaps brought no more to pass.

1) Helmut Thielicke from The Wisdom of Helmut Thielicke. This quote takes precedence for me over all others I have posted because, as much as the previous quote described my actual experience, this quote describes what I continue to hope for in pursuing theology as an occupation, as a obsession, as an act of devotion to God.

Theological thinking can and ought to grip a man like a passion.

Language and the Corruption of Meaning

It is interesting (which is, in this particular context, a euphemistic way of saying “tragic”) the way the dynamic and cultural nature of language can completely transform the meaning of words. Specifically it is “interesting” how Christians have been able to constantly reinterpret the Bible and the rich theology therein—at times under the conscious aegis of contemporary contextualization but more often entirely unconsciously and thus uncritically—with a ceaselessly shifting cultural lexicon. Words which have a very specific meaning have crossed time and language, arriving at the present only semantically equal to the original with the meaning totally lost. The form persists while the function is obscured. There would be little cause for alarm if, as many seem to think, the problem could be solved merely by opening a dictionary of ancient words. In truth, the dictionary only compounds the problem: explaining ancient words with modern glosses or, at best, drawing tenuous parallels to modern concepts.

That is perhaps all too vague to be much of a complaint. An example: Vladimir Lossky has suggested to some acclaim that the formula “one substance in three persons” has been corrupted by the modern understanding of personality. Speaking of the Father, Son, and Spirit as “persons” was filtered (and thus altered) immediately into Latin where the term carried with it a connotation of “mask” that is entirely absent in the Greek. The concept was further altered in the West as culture embraced a radical form of humanism in the Renaissance and, even more dramatically, in the Enlightenment. Western culture (and this embraces the Eastern Church) now understands the person in terms of radical individualism, the thing which makes the “me” actually “me” and not “you.” Contemporary culture lacks not only the appropriate language to speak about the hypostases of God but lacks the appropriate concepts to grasp the personhood in theology. The solution for generally embraced in theological discourse is to abandon the corrupted terms (something that the preceding sentence demonstrates that I am guilty of as well). Instead of the three “persons,” English theology reverts to a transliterated form of the Greek: “hypostasis.” This by no means solves the problem. Simply changing the word to more nearly resemble the original does not automatically attach to it the original concepts. Even as theologians strain to unravel the mystery of the original terminology, how the ancients conceived of hypostases is continually colored by how moderns conceive of personhood. In its extreme form, this tendency produces literature like The Shack where God is depicted as three people with different voices, different senses of humor, different tasks, and different interests, in short, different personalities. This, for Lossky and later for David Bentley Hart, represents a fundamental reversal of the way conceptual transformation ought to work. Christians are constantly allowing the changes in the concepts conveyed by language to alter the original concepts: modern personhood explains theological personhood. Hart suggests that rather than altering the language (i.e. using “hypostasis” instead of “person”), people ought to be rethinking the concept of modern personhood. A true understanding of theological personhood ought to have radical effects on how Christians conceptualize human personhood. In the most basic terms possible, instead of thinking that God is persons in the way humans are persons, people ought to understand how they are persons by thinking about how God is persons.

The problem is not restricted to the esoteric fields of theology proper and anthropology, nor is that my primary concern in arguing this point. In fact, the specific problem which is the catalyst for this thought was actually inspired in part (heaven help me) by the pope and in part by the Jars of Clay song, “Love Song for a Savior.” The pope, several weeks ago, warned a group of children that the “love” which was being peddled on the Internet and in popular culture was not really love at all. I agree, but, while the pope may recognize (at least in speeches) that “love” as expressed in the contemporary idiom is not love in the true sense, in the Christian sense, the secular definition of love has crept into our religious thought and corrupted our understanding of love as God intends it or as the biblical authors mean it. Case and point is the aforementioned Jars of Clay song, the first verse of which describes a girl in a rosy haze thanking Jesus for flowers, running into his arms, and singing over and over: “I want to fall in love with you.” This picture of “true love” is contrasted to those people who sit in church and ignore the sermon. Someday, they too will sing the young girl’s chorus: “I want to fall in love with you…my heart beats for you.”

It could not be more evident (to me at least) that this is a clear permeation of the secular idea of love into what ought to be a truer, more theologically sound conception of love. Jars of Clay is by no means the lone, or even the most egregious, offender. This idea of Christians “loving” Jesus and God “loving” us has seeped into our hymnography, into Christian pop music, into sermons, and into the popular consciousness. The idea is pervasive that the way God loves mirrors in some way the sentimentality of the contemporary understanding of love and that we should, therefore, reciprocate that “love” in kind. The statement “I love Jesus” is more likely to denote nothing more than a positive affection for the Savior than it is to suggest any concrete reality that aligns itself with biblical or historical theological perspectives on love. The affirmation that God loves us is likewise diluted beyond the point of substantial meaning such that God might just as easily be caricatured as our Heavenly Father who carries pictures of all His children in his wallet.

It may be alarmist of me, but I would suggest that the contemporary contextualization (which is, in this particular context, a euphemistic way of saying “rape”) of the meaning of “love” is the root of a number of significant theological problems. I wonder, for example, if the “faith alone” mentality which understands faith as the mere desire of Jesus to “come into my heart” is possible with a more concrete, less romantic view of what it is to love God and be loved by Him. More certainly, this false idea of love stands behind the overwhelming majority of objections to Christianity which begin, “How can a loving God” and end with a description of behavior which we would never permit from our spouses or relatives or friends—as if that were some kind of objective measure of love. Still more troubling are the manifold “loveless” marriages that people are stuck in. Love, rightly considered, is not something that is fallen into our fallen out of so much as it is something which the lover consciously chooses to express to the beloved through certain behaviors and dispositions. If God could fall out of love with humanity, then we would all be quite doomed. For just this reason, I object to the language of Jars of Clay about wanting to “fall in love” with Jesus, not—as with Dr. John Stackhouse—because it gives me the “homoerotic creeps” but because loving Jesus is not something which I fall into anymore than love (properly so-called) is something which I fall into with my wife.

The problem is not, as I said, so much with the words. We have preserved the right language. God should be spoken of as three persons and our basic stance toward Him ought to be described as love. The problem is the direction of meaning transformation for our words. Rather than allowing love rightly understood through divine guidance to determine how we ought to love both God and neighbor, we allow how we love apart from divine guidance to influence what we think is expected of us in the greatest commands. Human personhood ought to be defined relative to divine personhood, and human love ought to be define relative to divine love. In reversing these, our “contemporary contextualization” of meaning has led us into an unbelievably “interesting” modern problem.

Marriage: A Tabernacle of Truth

In reading (and inevitably rereading) David Bentley Hart, I have grown very fond of his explanation of a concept he typically refers to as "difference" within the Trinity, but which might be more familiar to the typical Christian as a theology of relationality or community. (I realize that in making this connection, as with others that will follow, I am being painfully imprecise in a way that would likely infuriate Hart. Nevertheless, because the concept of community is so prevalent in theology at the moment and because I believe that the emphasis on community arises from the same spirit as Hart's stress on the priority of difference I think some profit may be derived from equating the two, if only provisionally for the sake of simplicity.) In contrast to the "perverse and sinful fiction" that is contemporary understanding of personality, the Trinity as dogma demonstrates the absolute priority of difference (and again, I know that the imprecision of my language will not do justice to Hart's theology) against the illusion that a person exists as, in any sense, a self-contained autonomous self. Trinity affirms that relationality is not fundamentally the interaction of independent beings but actually the foundational makeup of Being itself, the essential substance of truth.

To highlight this, Hart makes reference to the analogies used by the early church to comprehend the Trinity. Particularly instructive are the social analogies of the Cappadocian fathers and the psychological analogies of Augustine. Rather than one being more fitting than the other, it is important to realize that both balance each other to create an ineffably distant analogy to the Trinitarian life. The relationality of the Trinity manifests both as an interior reality within the unity God (as in the psychological analogy) and as actual difference manifest in distinct persons (as in the social analogy) - though these persons are always understood in terms of the constant interplay of giving and receiving and giving again.

Thus Hart writes:

As the Son is the true image of the Father, faithfully reflecting him in infinite distance, and as the Spirit forever "prismates" the radiance of God's image into all the beautiful measures of that distance, one may speak of God as a God who is, in himself, always somehow analogous; the coincidence in God of mediacy and immediacy, image and difference, is the "proportion" that makes every finite interval a possible disclosure - a tabernacle - of God's truth.

In general, the very nature of humanity can be understood as one of these tabernacles of God's truth, a window into the infinite Trinitarian reality subsisting in perpetual unity in difference. As with the aforementioned analogies for Trinity, relationality makes up the essential character of all humanities being. There is no need to demonstrate the social nature of the human experience of difference, but Hart argues that even within ourselves there is interior difference. Humans experience themselves within themselves as an "exterior" object. Even in saying "I am..." we necessarily remove ourselves as the speaker, speaking about ourselves as we would an object that could be externally observed. Hart words it better:

...do we really possess identity apart from relation: is not even our "purest" interiority reflexive, knowing and loving itself as expression and recognition, engaged with the world of others through memoria and desire, inward discourse and outward intention (hence the genius of Augustine's "interior" analogies)?

Or consider:

...knowledge and love of neighbor fulfill the soul's velleity toward the world, and so grant each of us that internally constituted "self" that exists only through an engagement with a world of others; but that engagement is only possible only in that the structure of interiority is already "othered" and "othering," in distinct moments of consciousness' inherence in itself.

It was after reading and synthesizing this understanding of the Trinity (infinitely superior to other "community" themed explanations of the Trinity which I have lately been made to read) and its significance for anthropology that I saw an immediate and fantastic application to marriage as understood through the creation accounts. It struck me that marriage is also one such tabernacle of Trinitarian truth in which humans could "at infinite analogical remove" (to borrow from Hart) participate and understand the incomprehensible divine dynamic of difference. The dance - an Orthodox analogy - of experiencing the self as other and incorporating the other into the self without negating its otherness fits neatly into the language of the garden and the creation of woman. Eve is she who was taken from Adam (his rib) and formed into the other but who Adam immediately takes back into himself (as bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh) without ever negating her complimentary nature. The unity in marriage, the ideal unity perhaps inaccessible in this life of sin, is not a unity of purpose or will, not an exterior contract willingly accepted by two autonomous parties but the embracing of the other into the self so that, without negating the difference, there is separation of will or purpose. It is replaced by a unity of giving up self and embracing the other into self.

If this is true, then some of Hart's most beautiful language about the Trinity applies, however equivocally, to the marital relationship as an analogy of the divine life. Marriage is that relationship "of self-oblation according to which each 'I'...is also 'not I' but rather Thou." It is a symphony of mutual joy - the joy of knowing and of loving - which consists of a perpetual self-giving to the different other who is nevertheless self. It is the "fullness of shared love," a perpetual expression of the "dynamism of distinction and unity."

That, I think, is a beautiful image of marriage based analogically on a beautiful image of the Trinity. After all, as Hart reminds, we can always affirm that "God is beautiful: not only that God is beauty or the essence and archetype of beauty, nor even only that God is the highest beauty, but that, as Gregory the Theologian says, God is beauty and also beautiful, whose radiance shines upon and is reflected in his creatures."

Personal vs. Person

In general, in reading Stanley Grenz's Theology for the Community of God I have very often been unimpressed and only rarely disappointed. I did find one rather predictable occasion of unnerving theology, however, in his explanation of the personhood of the Holy Spirit. Grenz is part of that venerable tradition of Western theologians whose reductionist pneumatology equates the Holy Spirit to the bond of love between the Father and the Son. This is, so far as I'm concerned, an essentially binitarian view of God where the two person of Father and Son constitute God with the Spirit as an unintended consequence of their relationship. David Bentley Hart is more generous when dealing with the tradition in general. He writes:

There is a long, predominantly Western tradition of speaking of the Spirit as the vinculum caritatis between Father and Son, which - if taken to mean that in the divine life the indiscerptibility of love and knowledge is such that God's generation and procession enfold one another, the Spirit acting as the bond of love between Father and Son, the Son as the bond of knowledge between the Father and Spirit, the Father being the source of both - is a good and even necessary term. But it can also be misleading, in various ways: as Orthodox theologians occasionally worry, it can give the appearance that the Spirit is not irreducibly "personal" as Father and Son.

Correctly understood, however, it does none of this; and it depicts the Spirit as not simply the love of Father and Son, but also everlastingly the differentiation of that love, the third term, the outward, "straying," prodigal second intonation of that love.

Whatever the merit may be of Hart's evaluation of the tradition in general (and stricken as I am by intellectual hero worship, I doubt I could ever flatly disagree with him), Grenz's pneumatology seems to fall far short of Hart's "correctly understood" application of the tradition. Instead, Grenz sums his position up thus:

The personhood of the Spirit arises from the personal character of God as well. The love that binds the Father and the Son is the essence of the one God, for "God is love." God is also personal. Therefore his essential nature - love - is likewise personal. This essence is also the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who as the "concretization" of that essential divine character must be person.

I would like here to point out merely the most obvious flaw with this line of reasoning: simply because something is person does not mean that it is a person. The adjective "personal" in general usage - and, it would appear to me, in the above usage - means that object of the adjective involves persons. The love of the Father and the Son is personal because it involves the hypostases Father and Son. The love in my marriage is arguably personal on the same grounds, that it involves two (and hopefully only two) persons. By Grenz's logic, this makes the love in my marriage a person in its own right. Grenz argues, and I certainly agree, that God is personal, but it is because he is "constituted" of persons. I likewise agree that his love is personal, but again it is personal because it is "shared" among persons. None of this demands that the love is itself a person distinct from the persons who share the personal love.

In short, simply calling something personal does not logically demonstrate that it is a person. PC owners everywhere can sleep easy tonight.

The Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton (Excursus 4)

"Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it said, for instance, 'What is right in one age is wrong in another.' This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong."

This, I think, is still a pertinent critique of a largely aimless world. Chesterton criticizes here the rapidly changing aim of his time, but I think perhaps we suffer now from an even worse problem. We have as a culture abandoned aim in and of itself. To carry out Chesterton's analogy, the ideal is that women should wish to be elegant and adapt the changing means to the unchanging end. The flawed system of Chesterton's time is represented by women who thought they could improve by no longer wanting to be elegant but deciding instead to be oblong thus making both the ends and the means totally fluid. What has happened now is women no longer care to be elegant or to be oblong or to be anything. They do not even care to care, but have removed the possibility of an end altogether and thus making whatever means used not only fluid but ultimately irrelevant. There is a nasty nihilism lurking just beneath the surface of society, and we are determined to dance just as nearly to it as we can without falling off entirely into oblivion.

Or to put it in loftier terms (those of David Bentley Hart), in a world where the possibility of a definite end for progress has been destroyed by a post-Christian world's "ineluctable antinomianism" it should not surprise us to find that "the ethical strain in postmodern thought is usually its emptiest gesture."

Recommendation: Atheist Delusions

David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies is undeniably the most provocative book that I have ever read. His evaluation of the present in view of his adroit reconstruction of history has revolutionized the way I view the sweeping movements of history and the status of modern man. Here is a sample that I hope will commend the book to you:

There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other. In general, the unalterably convinced materialist is a kind of childishly complacent fundamentalist, so fervently, unreflectively, and rapturously committed to the materialist vision of reality that if he or she should encounter any problem -- logical or experiential -- that might call its premises into question, or even merely encounter a limit beyond which those premises lose their explanatory power, he or she is simply unable to recognize it. Richard Dawkins is a perfect example; he does not hesitate, for instance, to claim that "natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence." But this is a silly assertion and merely reveals that Dawkins does not understand the words he is using. The question of existence does not concern how it is that the present arrangement of the world came about, from causes already internal to the world, but how it is that anything (including any cause) can exist at all. This question Darwin and Wallace never addressed, nor were ever so hopelessly confused as to think they had. It is a question that no theoretical or experimental science could ever answer, for it is qualitatively different from the kind of questions that the physical sciences are competent to address. Even if theoretical physics should one day discover the most basic laws upon which the fabric of space and time is woven, or evolutionary biology the most elementary phylogenic forms of terrestrial life, or palaeontology an utterly seamless genealogy of every species, still we shall not have thereby drawn one inch nearer to a solution of the mystery of existence. No matter how fundamental or simple the level reached by the scientist -- protoplasm, amino acids, molecules, subatomic particles, quantum events, unified physical laws, a primordial singularity, mere logical possibilities -- existence is something else altogether. Even the simplest of things, and even the most basic of principle, must first of all be, and nothing within the universe of contingent things (nor even the universe itself, even if it were somehow "eternal") can be intelligibly conceived of as the source or explanation of its own being...

...One can, I imagine, consider the nature of reality with genuine probity and conclude that the material order is all that is. One can also, however, and with perhaps better logic, conclude that materialism is a grossly incoherent superstition; that the strict materialist is something of a benighted and pitiable savage, blinded by an irrational commitment to a logically impossible position; and that every "primitive" who looks at the world about him and wonders what god has made it is a profounder thinker than the convinced atheist who would dismiss such question as infantile.

"The divine nature exceeds each finite good..."

I admit before I start that I am grasping to understand what I read even as I read it and still as I write this, so I beg your pardon for however half formed are the ideas that I am about to present. They are my reflections upon reading an essay by David Bentley Hart, “The Mirror of the Infinite” (which I will quote at length).

Solid comprehension of how the Trinity functions both as a unity and a triunity has plagued Christian thought since the beginning of systematics. We have attacked it with analogy and discourse, but all to often the result is ultimately frustration. Any sense of satisfaction we gain, as with so many of our answers to the most pressing questions (I think particularly at the moment of Anselm’s satisfaction at having finally “proved” God), is always turned to despair upon deeper consideration of the problem. My aim is certainly not to solve once and for all the understanding of how God exists as both three and as one. Instead, I want to address a possible explanation for why we do not and perhaps cannot every fully wrap our minds around how God exists in community and personal unity.

This quote from Dr. Hart originally caught my interest, initially for its complex beauty but immediately after for its provocative content:

“Our being is synthetic and bounded; just as (again to borrow a later theological vocabulary) the dynamic inseparability but incommensurability in us of essence and existence is an ineffably distant analogy of the dynamic identity of essence and existence in God, the constant pendulation between inner and outer that constitutes our identities is an ineffably distant analogy of that boundless bright diaphaneity of coinherence, in which the exteriority of relations and interiority of identity in God are one, each Person wholly reflecting and containing and indwelling each of the others.”

Now certainly it is not a new thought that the nature of God should be reflected in the nature of man. After all, it was the Cappadocians who famously drew analogies between the community of man and the community of God. Such a social understand of God’s nature its relation to the human desire for community is actually quite fashionable now. Less recognized, but no less novel, is the realization that this analogy is “ineffably distant” from the nature of God. When one tries to understand the triunity of God as somehow analogous to three coessential humans, the theological fallout is mind boggling. This tends toward the conclusion that the community of God is so distant from ourselves that not only can we not use humanity as an analogy for understanding God, but we also cannot use our understanding of God’s community as normative for the “ineffably distant” reality of human community.

And, yet, I think both of those conclusions may be overturned when we understand precisely why it is that we are so ineffably distant in our reality from God. Dr. Hart describes the community of God:

“Surely this progression – from the divine nature’s infinite source, through God’s gnosis of himself, to the “conversion” of that recognition into delighted love, into agape – is a description of how the one God, even in his infinite simplicity, eternally conceives his equally infinite image, knowing himself perfectly in his Logos, and so eternally “wills” himself an equally infinite love, so completing his Trinitarian life in the movement of the Spirit.”

Knowledge and love, logos and agape if you will, are the communal acts of God. Through self-knowledge and self-love (in the words of Gregory of Nyssa about whom the article is written “He desires what he possesses, and possesses what he desires”) each Person not only knows Itself and loves Itself but knows the Others, without qualification, and loves the Others, without qualification. In so doing, every movement, every aspect of His being, every inclination of His nature is a total unity which is utterly indivisible. For where there is no distinction of will or knowledge, and where the “aporia that theology much inevitably confront” is solved by seeing God “in terms of the order of relations that distinguish the Persons from one another ‘causally’”, we are left with a totally satisfying, though no less incomprehensible, picture of God.

While still beyond human conception, while still necessitating that we stop before God in silent recognition of our ignorance and insufficiency, this revelation is not totally without merit. For not only can we use humanity’s psychology and society as analogies for God’s unity and community, but we can also reap the psycho-social benefits of understanding what separates our nature from closer analogy to God: namely imperfect knowledge of self and others, and imperfect love of self and others. Human psychology is strewn with the victims of inadequate self-knowledge and self-esteem (or love), and certainly every mental health professional would encourage people to develop both a healthy love of self and a healthy knowledge of one’s own person. Yet, do we ever think that in doing so, we better embody the image of God and more closely mimic what it is to people transformed into his Incarnate Image? The same applies for society. How often do we hear it preached how far a little understanding of one’s neighbor can go towards a peaceful, harmonious, and productive society? Nowhere do I hear, however, about how making the effort to know one another is actually pursuit of divinity, which itself is the perfect exemplar of what it means for Persons to be in fully disclosed harmony with one another.

So while the sinfulness of humanity and the limitations of our nature will always prevent any dramatic ascent towards the divine nature, the perfectness of that nature understood through the ineffably distant analogy of what we know of our own nature (created as it is in His image) can serve as a motivator for the personal and interpersonal transformation of God’s people into God’s likeness. I will leave you with a final quote from Dr. Hart, who clearly expresses his thoughts better than I do:

“We waver between these two analogical orders at an infinite distance from their supereminent truth; and obviously the orders are not separate: knowledge and love of neighbour fulfill the soul’s velleity towards the world, and so grant each of us that internally constituted ‘self’ that exists only through an engagement with a world of others…”